The full issue of ER(R)GO No. 38 (1/2019) - discourses of veg(etari)anism.

Title page and the letter of contents of ER(R)GO nr 38 (1/2019) - discourses of veg(etari)anism.

Er(r)go...,

time for a leftist salad. Above all, an animal matter, a serious matter: animalcide, animal harm and our moral cowardice, institutionalized butchering, vertical farming, intensive farming, live non-life of animals, a bird hecatomb, chickens burned at stake in Asia, festivals of dog meat in China, de-animalization of animals and ontological degradation of animal beings, animal lumpenproletariat. In the background, a historical march of everyday people for animal protein, and animals marching to slaughter, all in even step. Still, meat absorbs all suffering.

Animals ask questions of us: What do we eat when we eat – Körper or Leib? And are nonhuman animals “non-personal subjects of law” or “movable goods”? Somebody hesitates: scrambled tofu instead of scrambled eggs? And different attempts at an answer: vegetarianism, semi-vegeterianism, flexitarianism, abolitionism, reductionism, ingredientism, reductarianism, pro-topian model of moral progress, vistopia, carnism and neo-carnism, veganism, cheating vegetarianism, lazy veganism, identity veganism, revisionary political veganism, boycott veganism, ethical veganism, Ko sisters’ black veganism, naïve veganism and, finally, how else: post-veganism. All of this in the heat of battle: against species chauvinism, speciesim, food slavery, sexism, racism, homophobia and classism. Somebody states: a philosophy which feels the world is needed, not hermetic mumbo-jumbo. And that is the new question: to beat or not to beat?

Between texts and within them, various things happen. Aesthetes aestheticize life, white middle class appropriates ethical space, ethnocentric epistemologies of ignorance become apparentin vegan practices, vege-forums multiply, vegans demonstrate moral superiority over non-vegans, the Real becomes that which always returns to the same place, “but” gains a voice, the subject struggles with literalness, a poem battles against the infection of task-oriented thought, women who live without a partner eat less meat, somatic imagination turns to that which is hot and dry, animals, taking pity upon man’s ineptitude, sacrifice their flesh for food, the rich folks’ cows eat the bread of the poor, the number of people eating meat increases but chimpanzees prefer fruit with worms, and post-racial approach dominatesin vegan rhetoric. Meanwhile, Lacan forbids that which is impossible anyway, Freud divides the fellow neighbor into two parts, Henry Ford is inspired by the functioning of a slaughterhouse, Deleuze suggests the idea of universal meat, Marvin Harris battles for protein, the Central Market, a parody of a village marketplace, makes a mythological promise, one poet observes the world galled by linguistic clichés and pierces through the prosaic nature of plastic which does not give way to syntax. Coetzee in Texas rides a bike without his sandals, does not practice socialism or free love, does not take cold showers, does not eat meat, not even ribs or chicken. But he asks: four paws of one bear: what of the rest of the animal? And: what does an ox think of being taxonomized, without being consulted, as species of order lower than a bear. And how can the Meat Hall follow the spirit of times?

Art does not stay behind. Vienna Actionists return again to eat excrements, to copulate with animals, to slaughter, to gut and to rip apart. Huan, dressed in a meat suit, strolls through the city streets, in paintings women and men wriggle on the floor amidst pieces of meat and bite raw pieces of chicken, Jana Sterbak sews a dress out of steaks, Jannis Kounellis hangs pieces of beef on hooks along the wall. Heide Hatry says “Heide, you pig!,” and Lucien Freud simply is meat. Meat is the fabric of art! – and the homeless have nothing to eat. Fortunately, a new form of life emerges from the poems of Bartczyk – szczeźnik [perisher] – already not a human and not an animal.

We are accompanied in all this by various beings and nonbeings: an inferior being, cursed being, though not a cursed soldier, colonialism of beings, sacrifice-less meat, puremeat, meatless meat, 101.4 kg of meat per capita, capitalism with an animal face, secret vegan wars, grandma’s attitude towards meat, meaty connotations of masculinity, omnivore (omni?), 100 famous black vegans, cotton – an unethical vegan produce, “philosophical fragments on cats,” carnivorous character of subjectivity, an ethnoclass man, epistemological and ontological disobedience, ovo-lacto-fleshy excess, women – agents of change, technologically printed meat, our potential non non-humanity, inner life of animals, active ignorance, realistic utopias, celebritization of veganism, methodological tangles. Maybe these are all dubious beings-nonbeings; one fact, however, remains incontestable: the carnivorous fact.

The carnivorous fact! The carnivorous fact! The carnivorous fact!

Wojciech Kalaga
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4874-9734

P.S.: We wish to inform our Readers and Authors that – beginning with issue No. 40 (1/2020) – Er(r)go will become bilingual: we will be publishing articles in both Polish and English. The cover of this issue heralds these forthcoming changes.

Veganisation of the Academy and New Humanities: Veganism in the Context of Literary and Cultural Studies

The concept of “veganisation of the Academy” and “vegan turn” formulated by the author of the text refers to a growing interest of literary and cultural theorists, philosophers and psychologists in veganism perceived both as a practice and philosophy. The essay explores the history of this interest and focuses on its climax marked by the publication of The Vegan Studies Project. Food, Animals and Gender in the Age of Terror by Laura Wright, the monograph which creates the foundations for vegan studies. The essay makes an attempt to grasp the specificity of vegan studies  in the context of human-animal studies, ecocriticism and animal rights movements and places it on the map of contemporary humanities, with a special attention paid to the concept of prefigurative humanities proposed by Ewa Domańska. Seen in this light vegan studies emerges not only as a way to read literary and cultural text but also as a platform for a debate about an alternative vision of future.

This paper attempts to show several aspects of relations between veganism and reducetarianism. It analyses current definitions of both practices with particular emphasis on the evolution of a definition of reducetarianism – from the practice of a reduction of meat's consumption to the practice of a reduction of consumption of animal products in general. Then, on a basis of reducetarian's publications, the depiction of vegans and veganism is analyzed. The article ends with a presentation of arguments for maintaining a two-element classification of dietary practices with regard to animal products: reducetarianism (a reduction of animal products without an intention of their exclusion) and veganism (a reduction with an intention of such an exclusion).

This essay problematizes the complicated relationship between speciesist and racist oppression. Even though the lived experience of exploitation and the long struggle for justice and rights makes racialized groups especially sensitive to the suffering of the Other, the link between  human and non-human animals’ interests is, suprisingly, not so easy to make. Things are additionally complicated by the fact that veganism is usually perceived as a white, privileged lifestyle, therefore culturally alienating to people of color. This sense of alienation can be explained by the interiorization of colonial notions of identity, which label people of color as „natural meateaters”. The goal of radical vegans of color, a group of activists rapidly gaining visibility, is to dismantle the colonial matrix of power and struggle for a world free of all forms of oppresion. This essay attempts to present their ideological positions.

In many cultures eating meat was considered for a very long time a privilege of people enjoying higher economic and social status. Nowadays situation slowly changes: those who are rich and fortunate tend to resign from eating meat. This rejection can be treated as an important element of a lifestyle, but it can be also considered a type of fashion. In both cases, if higher social classes tend to reject meat and animal products, this tendency may gain a status of “exclusive lifestyles.” Following Thorstein Velben’s theory of circulation of consumption patterns, one can make an attempt to explain growing popularity of vegetarian and vegan diets. The assumption is that once they are turned into elements of an attractive lifestyle, mass consumers follow the example. The article analyzes growing tendencies to reject meat consumption in Poland and in Western culture.

Vegetarianism is – simply speaking – not eating meat. Veganism is a bit more radical option – it is not just not eating meat, but generally animal products: eggs, milk, dairy products, honey. These are relatively simple definitions for these types of diets. However, the problem begins when we define vegetarianism or veganism as a type of diet. Vegetarianism and veganism are therefore not only related to food, we can already speak of a certain lifestyle understood primarily as “the size and form of consumption.” In my article I want to follow the motives behind choosing this type of diet and to reflect not only on the health but also on the cultural aspects of veganism. There are more and more vegetarian and vegan products, new restaurants and fast food restaurants, if not completely vegetarian or vegan, at least including meatless or simply vegetable dishes in their menu. Multitudes of forums and online communities, YouTube channels and blogs with vegetable recipes are multiplying. All this lets us wonder whether the vegetarian/vegan diet has become something of a fashion that will soon pass or whether there are other reasons, and if so, what these reasons are.

Sue Coe, an English artist, said that animal slaughter has become normalized because it was hidden. Plastic-wrapped pieces of meaton supermarket shelves do not resemble living beings. Meat intended for mass consumption is no longer real, while in the contemporary art we can find examples of the reverse. Meat art puts viewers in an uncomfortable situation because what the food industry conceals(killing animals, blood, guts), they canexperience directly in an art gallery. It seems that meat in the contemporary art enables symbolic reference to many issues. In my text, I would like to show examples of the use of animals/meat by artists to shock and collide viewers with the Real, as well as to ask them ethical questions.

This article aims to introduce Florence Burgat, a phenomenologist and one of the outstanding contemporary animalist philosophers in France, with a special emphasis put on her last book, L’humanité carnivore (2017) in which she analyses “the carnivorous fact.” What Burgat describes as the equivalence principle would let us liberate from our anthropologically conditioned sacrificial structure, whereas clean meat makes it possible to elude the carnivorous fact as irreducible. However, unlike Burgat, I consider this fact in the context of the technological dimension of consumerist capitalism. Going beyond Burgat’s anthropological perspective (though with no intention to question the relevance of her observations), I opt for the perspective of a critique of political economy. What Burgat refers to as “ovo-lacto-meaty plethora” might be seen as an effect of a prototypical disruptive innovation. Therefore, one may read this article as an attempt for making the animal life the object of a critique of political economy.

Originally published by Granta in 1995, the essay  "Meat Country" by John Maxwell Coetzee is a starting point to think about human-animal relations in the context of food culture. Written by Coeztee during his stay in Austin, Texas, the essay explores American obsession with meat and the likelihood of vegetarianism to become a universal diet.

The present essay focuses on Kacper Bartczak’s latest volume, Pokarm Suweren, which is shown to be a radical attempt at expressing a posthumanist selfhood that instantiates itself as a borderline figure between language and body.

A review of the 2016 monograph by Karolina Pospiszil Swojskość i utrata. Obrazy Górnego Śląska w literaturze polskiej i czeskiej po 1989 roku [The Familiar and the Loss. The Images of Upper Silesia in Polish and Czech Literatures after 1989] concentrating upon the properties of the Auther's work, which decide about its interdisciplinary character and testify to her solid grounding in the research methodology (geocriticism), while allowing her to retain a unique poetics, adequate to the historical conditioning and the history of the described region.

A critical note on: Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity, edited by David Bradshaw, Laura Marcus and Rebecca Roach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2916.

A critical note on Lech Witkowski's book Humanistyka stosowana. Wirtuozeria, pasje, inicjacje. Profesje społeczne versus ekologia kultury. Wydawnictwo Impuls i Wyższa Szkoła Biznesu w Dąbrowie Górniczej, Kraków 2018. Hard cover, 790 pages.

English summaries of the feature texts of the issue.

Information for prospective Authors and Er(r)go stylesheet.

The colophon of the issue.